Anyone who sets himself a professional standard of presentation has to have
a standard procedure that's reliable. You can't make little mental notes to
yourself whenever you use dashes, telling yourself to run Autoformat later.
So in this case you'd have to always run Autoformat anytime you need the
document to be correct.

But if you have to do that, what's the use of Autoformat-as-you-type?

If MS offers a feature, it should work reliably.

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message
...
If you run AutoFormat over text such as you describe, the dashes will be
converted.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Uriel" wrote in message
...
Word's help describes the "Hyphens with dash" option at
Tools:AutoCorrect:AutoFormat-As-You-Type as follows: "When you type a
space
and one or two hyphens between text, Microsoft Word automatically inserts
an
en dash ( - ). If you type two hyphens and do not include a space before
the
hyphens, then an em dash ( - ) is created."

This is meant literally. You have to TYPE something after the hyphens. If
you paste, it won't work. Even if you type, the hyphens only get
transformed
when something like a space, period, or Enter is typed. You can see this
by
typing:

test--test

Of course this introduces the possibility of untransformed hyphens unless
you limit yourself to editing in only the ways the designers have
imagined.

What if after the second "test" above you move the cursor elsewhere? What
if
the second "test", followed by a period, was already there before you
entered the "test--" preceding it?

These problems make the feature unreliable for getting dashes as intended.